Florida Silver Liners’ Guide to Slavery

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Nearly 190 years before Florida education officials announced that school children would be taught that slavery was akin to a job-training program for black people, John C. Calhoun, an outspoken and racist slave-holding former vice president and U.S. senator from South Carolina, extolled what he claimed were the virtues of human servitude in an 1837 speech to Congress.

Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained such a civilized and improved condition, not only physically, but morally and intellectually, he said. Slavery, said Calhoun, was not an evil, but what he called a positive good.

There has never been a time in American history, including more than a century before this stolen land was established as a new nation, when white supremacists did not try to rehabilitate and defend the torture, subjugation and enslavement of black people.

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Slavery in America is white supremacy’s greatest crime against humanity. And part of his warped legacy is the relentless attempt to cover up a heinous crime that spanned 246 years and, through ingrained systemic racism, still claims victims to this day.

But that’s not what Florida kids will learn under the state’s new academic standards for African American history. What middle school students will learn is how slaves developed skills that, in some cases, could be applied to their personal advantage.

How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities, there was any benefit in being subjected to this level of dehumanization? Vice President Kamala Harris said during a July 21 speech in Jacksonville, Fla. She added: “They insult us to try to enlighten us and we will not accept it.

Call Florida’s Black History School Curriculum what it is deceptive white nationalist hagiography fostered by the racist, ahistorical, and anti-education policies of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican presidential candidate. The perennial lie that black people took personal advantage of slavery is the kind of blatant revisionism that is a gateway to denying America’s original sin.

In his seminal book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Ibram X. Kendi, founder and director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, writes, Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their time, in order to redirect the blame for the racial disparities of their time away from those policies and onto black people.

But what Florida’s Republican-run Department of Education has done is even more insidious. In the lie that slavery gave some black people applicable skills, a toxic idea that Africans forcibly brought to this land, and their descendants, were uneducated savages with no expertise or knowledge who were tamed by hard work, Christianity and white benevolence. His wickedness turned into magnanimity and those who profited from slavery were anointed as rescuers of a desolate people. This was the root of the lie used to justify the enslavement of black people.

That’s what Calhoun meant when he said that black people had become so civilized and so improved, as if chattel slavery was some kind of graduation school. White supremacy disrupted not only families and communities in Africa, but also long-established cultures, businesses and ingenuity. But Florida college kids won’t learn anything about it.

In a statement, Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, said, “How can our students be equipped for the future if they don’t have a complete and honest picture of where we came from? [Governor] DeSantis pursues a political agenda guaranteed to pit good people against each other, and in the process, he deceives our children. They deserve the full truth of American history, the good and the bad.

DeSantis has spent too much time attacking books, critical race theory, and the LGBTQ community, especially trans youth, none of which seem to spur his flagging White House aspirations. He tried to distance himself from this disgusting curriculum reference, but his hateful policies, including his Stop WOKE Act, opened a new avenue for this two-sided approach to misinform children not just about slavery, but about their country.

There was no personal benefit for enslaved blacks. None. There is only an age-old urgency to justify the horrors of slavery and absolve white supremacy. Florida education officials tore up a chapter from Calhouns’ silver linings guide to slavery, which is as old and almost as vile as the atrocity itself. And this intentional revision of the facts will continue towards its ultimate goal, a devastating erasure of the truth.

René Graham is a columnist for the Globe. She can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @reneeygraham.

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